Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Prototype: Puppeteer for Firefox

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 133 posts

Re: Prototype: Puppeteer for Firefox

#23

Post by oliwarner »

Crinus wrote: post #16
trishmapow2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I thought Firefox usage would be increasing based on all the hype/people converting on HN/other tech websites but the market share is actually falling. Guess it puts into perspective the size of that cohort compared to the rest of the world.

After Firefox broke most extensions with their removal of XUL extensions and embrace of "WebExtensions" (aka Chrome extensions), it lost a major differentiation point from Chrome. People simply have no (immediate, practical) reason to use Firefox. Back in the Mozilla days i was using Mozilla because it was very powerful and flexible despite being very slow (i remember watching Mozilla 0.6's dialog boxes draw themselv…

It also doubled in speed. As a long term FF user (and webdev), I was over the moon to trade in a few extensions for that sort of performance boost.

A year or so after the fact, I can't even remember what I've lost. Couldn't have been that important.

Re: Prototype: Puppeteer for Firefox

#24

Post by rat87 »

d33 wrote: post #17
sebazzz wrote: post #15

For automated testing, why Puppeteer instead of Selenium?

Much better access to low-level information. You can hook (and mock) requests, see what POST data was sent and basically do lots of magic. Also, my experience with Selenium under Python is that doing anything bigger quickly turns into one giant timing hack.

back when I did selenium (with python) I wait-ed for the wait for next page to load (html element becomes stale) and for textbox/checkbox/etc. you are selecting to be present with a few tiny helper functions. That took most of the magic sleeps out although I still needed timeouts on the waits

Re: Prototype: Puppeteer for Firefox

#26

Post by blodovnik »

Firefox has lost its lead because it's lost the developers.

Chrome has invested massively in developer tools for chrome and it's shows.... I think chrome is the best software ever written. The developer tools are so powerful that it'd hard to even know the full breadth of what's in there.

Firefox offers nothing to developers over chrome, which is sad.

Re: Prototype: Puppeteer for Firefox

#27

Post by Diti »

fsiefken wrote: post #4

is there a benefit to using firefox with puppeteer compared to chromium and puppeteer? or is it just a matter of choice and being able to also use firefox for automated testing?

Deliverables are supposed to be tested on every major browser. I believe the goal is to use both.

Re: Prototype: Puppeteer for Firefox

#29

Post by felixfbecker »

world32 wrote: post #8

Nice work, I have been using puppeteer with chrome recently and it is a great piece of kit. If the prototype is successful will you keep the chrome and firefox packages separate or merge them and have an abstraction layer so puppeteer can issue commands regardless of chrome/firefox being used for the browser?

They already have the same API

Re: Prototype: Puppeteer for Firefox

#30

Post by world32 »

felixfbecker wrote: post #29
world32 wrote: post #8

Nice work, I have been using puppeteer with chrome recently and it is a great piece of kit. If the prototype is successful will you keep the chrome and firefox packages separate or merge them and have an abstraction layer so puppeteer can issue commands regardless of chrome/firefox being used for the browser?

They already have the same API

Yeah, that doesn't answer my question though ;)
Post reply on HN